"You're right, Lusic—there are only animals out there. Animals that hate us so much, some of them have learned to hold stones in their paws and use them for tools. They hate us so much they chip, chip, chip away at the dome all day, and gnaw at it, and howl in the night for us to come out, because they hate us so.
"We only hope they won't break through. We can only hope the children will drive them away in time. We don't know. But you'd rather be comfortable in your hope. You'd rather come in here and quibble at my methods. But I'm not your kind. Because if I don't know, I don't hope. I act. And because I act, and you don't, and because I'm in charge, you'll do what I tell you."
He went back to his desk and shoved it back to its place. "That's all. I've heard your complaint, and rejected it. Get back to work re-inforcing the dome walls. I want that done."
They looked at him, and at each other. He could see the indecision on their faces. He ignored it, and after a moment they decided for retreat. They could have killed him, acting together, and they could have acted together against any other man in the dome. But not against him. They began going out.
Lusic was the last through the door. As he reached to pull it shut, he said, "We may kill you if we can get enough help."
Brendan looked at his watch and said quietly: "Lusic—it's the twenty-fifth day of Kislev, on Chaim Weber's calendar. Stop off at his place and tell him it's sunset, will you?"
He waited until Lusic finally nodded, and then ignored him again until the man was gone.
When his office door was locked, he went to the television screen buried in the wall behind him, switched it on, and looked out at the world outside.
Rain—rain at a temperature of 1° Centigrade—blurred the camera lenses, sluicing over them, blown up through the protective baffles, giving him not much more than glutinous light and shadow to see. But Brendan knew what was out there, as surely as a caged wolf knows the face of his keeper. Near the top of the screen was a lichenous gray-green mass, looming through the bleakness, that he knew for a line of beaten, slumped mountains. Between the mountains and the dome was a plain, running with water, sodden with the runoff from the spineless hills, and in the water, the animals. They were the color of rocks at the bottom of an ocean—great, mud-plastered masses, wallowing toward each other in combat or in passion, rolling, lurching, their features gross, heavy, licking out a sudden paw with unbelievable speed, as though giant hippopotami, swollen beyond all seeming ability to move, still somehow had managed to endow themselves with the reflexes of cats. They crowded the plain, a carpet of obscenity, and for all they fed on each other, and mated, and sometimes slept with their unblinking eyes open and swiveling, they all faced toward the dome and never stopped throwing themselves against its flanks, there to hang scrabbling at the curve of the concrete, or doing more purposeful things.